By Katherine Stockton-Juárez
The 2025 Inspiring Generations of New Innovators to Impact Technologies in Energy (IGNIITE) awards, celebrated earlier this month by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), cast a spotlight on the importance of supporting early-career scientists doing high-risk, high-reward energy research. The 2025 awardees (many of whom are connected to AAU member universities) are conducting research in areas ranging from harnessing the power of fusion to employing AI tools to improve energy storage efficiency and cost-effectiveness to creating self-healing concrete infrastructure.
The IGNIITE awards support early-career researchers “pursuing disruptive, unconventional ideas across America’s most critical energy technology priorities.” Eight of this year’s 18 awardees are professors at AAU member institutions. Four of last year’s awardees received the IGNIITE Director’s Award (which provides an additional year of funding) this year; two of these recipients were from AAU institutions. The results from the very first cohort are already demonstrating the model’s merit, as four out of 23 projects from 2024 earned Director’s Awards recognizing exceptional technical progress within two years.
AAU members and other research universities are uniquely positioned to amplify these investments. They provide the institutional infrastructure that allows an IGNIITE awardee to build a research program for long-term impact. Here are some of the stories of the latest IGNIITE awardees who are affiliated with AAU member universities:
At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Sebastian Kube is building a robotic laboratory that invents new metal alloys almost entirely on its own.
Finding the right combination of metals to withstand extreme heat and radiation (the kind found inside fusion reactors and advanced turbines) has historically taken years of painstaking human trial and error. Kube’s system, guided by artificial intelligence, can synthesize and test roughly 100 new alloys per week with minimal human involvement. That pace of discovery would have been unimaginable a generation ago, and it has direct implications for the next generation of nuclear energy and high-efficiency power generation.
- At Purdue University, Woongkul Lee is extending his work on creating a new class of electrical generators. These are the machines that sit at the heart of virtually every power system, from wind turbines to backup power facilities. More efficient generators mean less energy lost in the conversion process, lower costs, and a more resilient grid.
Also at Purdue, Qi Dong is working on energy efficiency when it comes to manufacturing the basic chemicals that underpin modern life.
Ammonia and ethylene are essential ingredients in everything from fertilizer to plastics to pharmaceuticals, and producing them today consumes vast amounts of energy. Dong is using AI and a form of plasma-based chemistry to develop a completely new way to make these chemicals, one that could be deployed in small, distributed facilities rather than massive industrial plants. If successful, this could mean lower energy costs, a cleaner manufacturing sector, and greater resilience for American supply chains.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two young faculty members are tackling very different but equally pressing problems. Samantha Coday is working to shrink the hardware that controls electricity as it moves through our power systems. Today, those devices are bulky, heavy, and inefficient. Coday’s research could produce a new generation of power control equipment that is dramatically smaller and lighter, without sacrificing capability. That matters enormously for electric vehicles (where every pound counts), for renewable energy installations, and for the broader electrical grid.
Meanwhile, also at MIT, Coday’s colleague Suraj Cheema is approaching energy storage from a completely new angle: data centers. Data centers are the physical backbone of the internet and AI and are now among the fastest-growing consumers of electricity in the country. Cheema is investigating a class of materials that could store energy far more densely than anything available today. If his research succeeds, the power systems inside tomorrow’s data centers could handle surging electricity demand far more efficiently, reducing both energy costs and environmental impact.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, Akanksha Menon is reimagining how we turn saltwater into fresh water.
With water scarcity an increasingly urgent issue across the American West and much of the world, better desalination technology could be transformative. Menon’s system is designed to avoid the filters and pipes that clog and corrode in today’s desalination plants, using heat recycling to save energy in the process. Just as importantly, her approach produces recoverable minerals as a byproduct, including materials critical to batteries and electronics manufacturing. At a time when the United States is working urgently to reduce its dependence on foreign sources for these minerals, a technology that pulls them from seawater provides an international competitive edge.
- At Johns Hopkins University, Corey Oses is working on one of the most ambitious energy goals humanity has ever pursued: fusion power. Fusion (the same process that powers the Sun) has the potential to provide virtually limitless, clean energy – but making it work reliably on Earth requires solving a series of extraordinarily difficult materials problems. One of the most persistent involves the surfaces inside reactors; current designs depend on toxic cesium-based coatings that don’t hold up well at scale. Oses is developing alternative materials that could replace cesium, moving fusion energy from a theoretical dream closer to a practical reality.
- At the University of California, Irvine, Xian Shi is conducting research into improving energy storage. The materials inside a battery electrode are expensive and energy-intensive to produce; Shi is developing a process that converts natural gas directly into the thin carbon films needed for battery electrodes, skipping manufacturing steps and dramatically cutting costs and energy use. Cheaper, more efficiently produced battery materials could accelerate the expansion of American battery manufacturing, reducing dependence on overseas suppliers and lowering the cost of electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage.
At Washington University in St. Louis, Christopher Cooper is conducting research into improving the efficiency of plastic recycling.
Half of all plastic produced in the United States is made from a class of materials called polyolefins (the same polymers found in grocery bags, packaging, and pipes), and most of it ends up in landfills because it is notoriously difficult to recycle. Cooper is developing a way to take mixed plastic waste and turn it back into usable materials, without the solvents and chemical processes that make current recycling methods energy-intensive and costly. A working solution would reduce landfill waste and cut the energy required by industry.
- And at Michigan State University, Qingxu Jin is rethinking one of the oldest human-made building materials on Earth: concrete. Much of America’s energy infrastructure (e.g., pipelines, nuclear facilities, and storage tanks) is built from materials that crack under extreme temperatures and require costly repairs. Jin is engineering a new class of ultra-flexible concrete designed not just to withstand extreme heat and cold, but to heal its own small cracks before they become major structural failures. Infrastructure that can repair itself is infrastructure that lasts longer, costs less to maintain, and fails less often. This resilience becomes more valuable as the United States expands its energy systems to meet 21st-century demands.
These research projects are not incremental improvements to existing technology; they are the “moon shots” of the energy sector. The private sector alone will not fund these kinds of high-risk, potentially high-reward bets – and research universities are uniquely equipped to pursue them. The United States must continue to pursue this pipeline of American energy innovation by maintaining robust and consistent funding for ARPA-E and its flagship early-career programs.
Katherine Stockton-Juárez is a government relations and public policy assistant at AAU.